I bought an Olympus 500L a couple weeks ago. For the most part, I am very happy with it. There is one problem:

Sky, walls, and anything else with very slight variations in color looks terrible! I've tried correcting the problem in Paint Shop Pro to no avail. The pictures have VERY obvious bands of color differentiation. i.e. If a picture with sky in it goes from light to dark, there will be a line of color differentiation.

I don't think that this is a product of my Olympus camera because I've seen the same problem on other pictures posted on various sites.

My questions: - What causes this? Is it lack of color depth? I thought with 24(?) bit color depth, the eye couldn't differentiate between similar colors. - Are some cameras better at handling this than others? - Is there any way around it? In software or hardware. - Will this ALWAYS be a problem with digital cameras?

I am very happy with shots with lots of detail but these type of shots make my digital camera impractical for all uses. I really hope there is a solution to this.

If anyone would like for me to send you a couple of .jpgs to see what I am talking about, email me.

Thanks!

-- David Coutts (dcoutts@mindspring.com), April 04, 1999

Answers

Just after I posted, I followed a link that gives a good example of this. Look at the wall on the right of the girl and the floor. And these were taken with a CP950 and a C-2000Z!

http://www.dreamarts.co.jp/magazine/nishikawa/contents/990328/

P.S. My display is currently in 16bit. When I changed it to 32bit, it looked even worse.

-- David Coutts (dcoutts@mindspring.com), April 04, 1999.

Set your monitor display to 24-bit, (True), color. This may cause you to decrease resolution somewhat if you don't have enough video RAM but should fix the color problem. The streaking you see in areas of close colors is caused by dithering on the display to try and show 16M colors with 64K or less colors.

-- Brad Grant (grants@mindspring.com), April 05, 1999.

Thanks. That fixed it.

In my second post above, I talked about trying this same thing already (16->32bit). The problem was that I was looking at the pictures from the Japanese site (through my browser) and therefore the pictures looked even worse.

Looking at my own pictures through Paint Shop Pro, they look much better now. Thanks agian.

-- David Coutts (dcoutts@mindspring.com), April 05, 1999.